i have a couple of hawthorns in some ones garden and i would like to leave them there untill next year. Shall i go around and cut all the radial roots now ,which are pretty big.Shall i cut them to size so i don't need to do it again to fit in a pot.

They had no taper so i have been making some with a chainsaw. I may have to start again on the one as now i look at a photo it looks too long and straight .

Last edited by Smithy on Tue Feb 02, 2010 4:59 pm; edited 1 time in total

Hello Smithy. I think it's a good idea to give the trees a chop around. It might be an idea to mound some soil up higher, to stop the surface roots drying out too much in the Summer. Unless you can go and water them? I think they will need more than a year in the ground to get some development and structure.

If the time is available I always try to spade around the tree a season prior to the real "dig out". I have had a lot of success doing this. I have also a couple times dug down, spaded, and replaced some of the surrounding soil with some decent bonsai soil to help with the new roots we like to see but, I haven't done this enough times to tell you if it works all the time. Good luck looks like a fatty!

Fuzzy wrote:Hi smithyWhat’s the dimensions of the trunk? It looks huge from here! Nice root spread Btw. I see a short powerful tree in the future. Do you have any pictorial ideas for its future development yet?

I think the trunks are around 20cms across. I'll have a measure on Fri when i am there. I don't have any plans drawn as i'm just going to grow and cut for a few years. Hollowed out short stocky tree is as far as the plan goes at the moment.

Joe Hatfield wrote:If the time is available I always try to spade around the tree a season prior to the real "dig out". I have had a lot of success doing this. I have also a couple times dug down, spaded, and replaced some of the surrounding soil with some decent bonsai soil to help with the new roots we like to see but, I haven't done this enough times to tell you if it works all the time. Good luck looks like a fatty!

Regards,_joe

I was thinking of digging around and chain sawing the big roots as i will supposed to be working in the garden and i haven't got too long to spend on it. Blunt saw afterwards though I shall decide if the spade will do it when i'm there. I cut the roots on a much smaller one last year and i'm going to collect that one next week, so i will see how well it has done.

I did one a few years ago and put bonsai soil around the roots and cut all the top, but learnt the hard way about sheep and they killed it by eating all the bark off.

I have just cut a blackthorn down in a field and this time i have piled all the branches on top of it.

I've been forming a theory, slowly, about my lack of success with the supposedly easy collection of Hawthorn. Every one of the ones I failed with were superb yamadori, the sort you would walk a good way to find and had extreme movement, old barky trunks and (crucially) virtually no new growth, as it had all been eaten off, continually for many years. This results in a natural bonsai appearance but with a knobbly, continually chewed periphery.

I failed with a beauty early on and gave up on yamadori Crataegus for a while.

I then had easy success with moving garden grown ones on many occasions, and growing them on to develop reasonable pre-bonsai. So when the opportunity arose, I took and followed advice from a leading expert (Mr T Tickle) and dug 4 extremely sheep grazed ones. At the right time of year, maximum root collection and with the right after care. To my horror, they all died.

I now think that they had insufficient reserves (due to overgrazing) to survive collection.

Perhaps pre-cutting roots AND protecting from grazing might help.

_________________“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” - Charles Darwin.